Pilgrimage Quotes

“None of your knowledge, your reading, your connections will be of any use here: two legs suffice, and big eyes to see with. Walk alone, across mountains or through forests. You are nobody to the hills or the thick boughs heavy with greenery. You are no longer a role, or a status, not even an individual, but a body, a body that feels sharp stones on the paths, the caress of long grass and the freshness of the wind. When you walk, the world has neither present nor future: nothing but the cycle of mornings and evenings. Always the same thing to do all day: walk. But the walker who marvels while walking (the blue of the rocks in a July evening light, the silvery green of olive leaves at noon, the violet morning hills) has no past, no plans, no experience. He has within him the eternal child. While walking I am but a simple gaze.”
― Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

“Frequently we do not leave the past behind. We clasp on to it. We dissect it, and let fears for the future, tempered by the past, unconsciously prevent us from taking up the task eternal.”
― Ray Simpson, Exploring Celtic Spirituality

“The Native Americans, whose wisdom Thoreau admired, regarded the Earth itself as a sacred source of energy. To stretch out on it brought repose, to sit on the ground ensured greater wisdom in councils, to walk in contact with its gravity gave strength and endurance. The Earth was an inexhaustible well of strength: because it was the original Mother, the feeder, but also because it enclosed in its bosom all the dead ancestors. It was the element in which transmission took place. Thus, instead of stretching their hands skyward to implore the mercy of celestial divinities, American Indians preferred to walk barefoot on the Earth: The Lakota was a true Naturist – a lover of Nature. He loved the earth and all things of the earth, the attachment growing with age. The old people came literally to love the soil and they sat or reclined on the ground with a feeling of being close to a mothering power. It was good for the skin to touch the earth and the old people liked to remove their moccasins and walk with bare feet on the sacred earth. Their tipis were built upon the earth and their altars were made of earth. The birds that flew in the air came to rest on the earth and it was the final abiding place of all things that lived and grew. The soil was soothing, strengthening, cleansing and healing. That is why the old Indian still sits upon the earth instead of propping himself up and away from its life-giving forces. For him, to sit or lie upon the ground is to be able to think more deeply and to feel more keenly; he can see more clearly into the mysteries of life and come closer in kinship to other lives about him. Walking, by virtue of having the earth’s support, feeling its gravity, resting on it with every step, is very like a continuous breathing in of energy. But the earth’s force is not transmitted only in the manner of a radiation climbing through the legs. It is also through the coincidence of circulations: walking is movement, the heart beats more strongly, with a more ample beat, the blood circulates faster and more powerfully than when the body is at rest. And the earth’s rhythms draw that along, they echo and respond to each other. A last source of energy, after the heart and the Earth, is landscapes. They summon the walker and make him at home: the hills, the colours, the trees all confirm it. The charm of a twisting path among hills, the beauty of vine fields in autumn, like purple and gold scarves, the silvery glitter of olive leaves against a defining summer sky, the immensity of perfectly sliced glaciers … all these things support, transport and nourish us.”
― Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

“Walking causes a repetitive, spontaneous poetry to rise naturally to the lips, words as simple as the sound of footsteps on the road. There also seems to be an echo of walking in the practice of two choruses singing a psalm in alternate verses, each on a single note, a practice that makes it possible to chant and listen by turns. Its main effect is one of repetition and alternation that St Ambrose compared to the sound of the sea: when a gentle surf is breaking quietly on the shore the regularity of the sound doesn’t break the silence, but structures it and renders it audible. Psalmody in the same way, in the to-and-fro of alternating responses, produces (Ambrose said) a happy tranquillity in the soul. The echoing chants, the ebb and flow of waves recall the alternating movement of walking legs: not to shatter but to make the world’s presence palpable and keep time with it. And just as Claudel said that sound renders silence accessible and useful, it ought to be said that walking renders presence accessible and useful.”
― Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

“But walking causes absorption. Walking interminably, taking in through your pores the height of the mountains when you are confronting them at length, breathing in the shape of the hills for hours at a time during a slow descent. The body becomes steeped in the earth it treads. And thus, gradually, it stops being in the landscape: it becomes the landscape. That doesn’t have to mean dissolution, as if the walker were fading away to become a mere inflection, a footnote. It’s more a flashing moment: sudden flame, time catching fire. And here, the feeling of eternity is all at once that vibration between presences. Eternity, here, in a spark.”
― Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

“Slowness means cleaving perfectly to time, so closely that the seconds fall one by one, drop by drop like the steady dripping of a tap on stone. This stretching of time deepens space. It is one of the secrets of walking: a slow approach to landscapes that gradually renders them familiar. Like the regular encounters that deepen friendship.”
― Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

“Blinding, mineral, shattering silence. You hear nothing but the quiet crunch of stones underfoot. An implacable, definitive silence, like a transparent death. Sky of a perfectly detached blue. You advance with eyes down, reassuring yourself sometimes with a silent mumbling. Cloudless sky, limestone slabs filled with presence: silence nothing can sidestep. Silence fulfilled, vibrant immobility, tensed like a bow. There’s the silence of early morning. For long routes in autumn you have to start very early. Outside everything is violet, the dim light slanting through red and gold leaves. It is an expectant silence. You walk softly among huge dark trees, still swathed in traces of blue night. You are almost afraid of awakening. Everything whispering quietly. There’s the silence of walks through the snow, muffled footsteps under a white sky. All around you nothing moves. Things and even time itself are iced up, frozen solid in silent immobility. Everything is stopped, unified, thickly padded. A watching silence, white, fluffy, suspended as if in parentheses.”
― Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

“Seekers of wisdom, seekers of life.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind

“When a great multitude is making a pilgrimage, I should never advise him to do so, for as a rule people return on these occasions in a state of greater distraction than when they went. And many set out and make these pilgrimages for recreation rather than devotion.”
― Saint John of the Cross, The Complete Works of Saint John of the Cross, of the Order of Our Lady of Mount Carmel

“With great passion, observe every details of the sacred journey.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!

“..seriousness has been misunderstood as sincerity. Seriousness is a sickness. A serious seeker is searching for truth with sadness, with a burden on his head. He is not interested in the pilgrimage.

Life is eternal, hence there cannot be any goal. All ideas of goals are contradictory to the idea of eternal life. And if life is eternal, then you have to enjoy each moment as if you have reached the goal. Each moment is a goal in itself. Don't wait to rejoice when you have reached the goal. That kind of goal does not exist. Use every moment as if you have arrived. It is always as if you have arrived. You are always arriving.

And I don't think existence wants you to be serious. I have not seen a serious tree. I have not seen a serious bird. I have not seen a serious sunrise. I have not seen a serious starry night. It seems they are all laughing in their own ways, dancing in their own ways. We may not understand it, but there is a subtle feeling that the whole existence is a celebration. I teach you celebration. And laughter has certainly to be one of the major ingredients in this celebration.”
― Osho

“Helping a human is worth a hundred pilgrimages.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Centurion Sermon: Mental Por El Mundo

“The pilgrimage began boldly
Flying, alone, business class only
And the Atlantic stretched into blends
Of grey --where do the clouds touch the water?
I worried about swelling; such an elderly
Concern, but I drank water as fast as the
Man in 48G drank coffee
(The alcohol was reserved for the woman in 47A)
Landing, I carefully followed instructions
And laughed when he held up my name on a sign, as if
He was privileged for my presence --didn't the flowers signify?
Kissing, right there, in crowded Heathrow
I could hear the director wanting a replay
But we had trains to catch...”
― Cheryl Seely Savage, Carve a Place for Me

“I sat down on a bridge, and wondered; I saw before me hundreds upon hundreds of miles, painful and exhausted, and I asked heaven if this was necessary to a pilgrimage.”
― Hilaire Belloc, The Path to Rome

“We are all on pilgrimage on this earth. No one can foretell the moment of departure.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“You need to go. You will go,” she proclaimed. “You’re already a pilgrim, Freddi.”
Every time I spoke to her, she repeated it for years, including the last time I’d spoken with her, just a few days before I walked off the doorstep of that albergue in Saint-Jean-Pied-De-Port.
“Pilgrim.”
She was the first to call me that, but not the last. Everyone became a pilgrim that first day. Our openness with one another created something. We surrounded ourselves with people of all generations and cultures and backgrounds; we were united in exhaustion from carrying our damaged, decaying spirits.”
― Steven Keith Hunter, Relish In the Tread

“He could easily slip and pull the trigger and accidently shoot me in the eye. A grating pain struck my shoulder blade from behind. I dropped to my knees in the thick mud, ankles and feet shaking. My confidence disappeared. The three lads were there, powerful as bulls, with wind coming from the largest one’s nostrils. He stood above me, laughing as he put me to the ground with his big, wooden stave.”
― Steven Keith Hunter, Relish In the Tread

“Every now and again, people need to pause at life,' Catherine said in her soft French accent, 'they need to enjoy some calm and reflect. Pilgrimage is all about the simple pleasures we too often forget.”
― Harry Bucknall, Like a Tramp, Like A Pilgrim: On Foot, Across Europe to Rome

“Domingo looked shocked when I let slip that I had Black Sabbath on my iPod. ‘Just because we’re on a pilgrimage doesn’t mean it has to be all hair shirts and misery, you know. They had plenty of fun in the Middle Ages - troubadours, mead, wine every night.”
― Harry Bucknall, Like a Tramp, Like A Pilgrim: On Foot, Across Europe to Rome

“It was Reto, with whom I crossed the Cisa Pass, who said that a pilgrimage is made up of two parts: the first, penance, while you order your thoughts; and the second, absolution, when you walk with a clear head. But I believe there is also a third part, and that is grief for the hole in life that the completed undertaking leaves.”
― Harry Bucknall, Like a Tramp, Like A Pilgrim: On Foot, Across Europe to Rome

“The driver nods and yanks the steering wheel like an old quack pulling out a molar, bumping us up onto the kerb. We stop beside a stall selling juice. Lesley and I approach the proprietor, who’s got a generous supply of teeth. Most of them seem to be vying for a seat up the front where the view’s better. He’s stuffing ripe oranges down the throat of a large trembling juicer. It’s whirring, grinding, and gushing a copious flood of juice into a bucket. Unfortunately, the bucket’s got a halo of flies. Lesley, not wanting to offend the man, leans closer to me and whispers, ‘It looks a bit unhygienic.’
‘Unhygienic? Lesley, I can actually see a blue bottle washing shit off his feet with the juice.”
― Paul Donaldson, Swami Premananda & The Temple of Whom

“For what is life but pilgrimage? And what is life but conflict?”
― Alexander Freed, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

“A hundred hajj won't make you holy, if your heart is ever cold and dead.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Dervis Vadisi: 100 Promissory Sonnets

“Pilgrim of love is pilgrim of truth.”
― Abhijit Naskar, World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets

“God is a Gypsy.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The God Sonnets: Naskar Art of Theology

“I walked away from the world and into the monastery, believing that where prayer begins, lies finally lose their voice.”
― Angelika Regossi, Russian Colonial Food: Journey through the dissolved Communist Empire

“Man, this creature so 'noble in faculty,' moves step by step in a pilgrimage that is destined to bring him only back again to the inanimate state of the stone. From dust we are, and to dust we ultimately return.”
― Rollo May, Love and Will

“And when you look along the way we've come, there are spirals of vultures wheeling.”
― Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines

“So Petrus thought my relationship to God was based too much on concept, on intellect, and on reasoning; I felt that his was too simplistic and intuitive.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Pilgrimage

“Crazy doesn't mean you want to conquer America or talk to the birds like Saint Francis of Assisi. Even a vegetable vendor on the street corner can show this flame of madness if he likes what he is doing.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Pilgrimage